[Todd Kopriva]

I can confirm what Chris said. I strongly recommend installing the update.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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[Todd Kopriva]

You can create a motion path from a shape path by copying and pasting. You select the Path property, copy, select the property to animate with the motion path, and then paste.

Your shape path must be a Bezier path, not a parametric path for this to work.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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[Todd Kopriva]

I suggest that you file a bug.

To report bugs, send a detailed bug report (including information about the version number of your software,
some details about your computer, et cetera) to aebugs@adobe.com.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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[Todd Kopriva]

How about Purge > All?

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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[Todd Kopriva]

There’s quite a bit of information in After Effects Help about automated rendering and network rendering, too. (I also point to Aharon’s tutorial from After Effects Help.)

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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[Todd Kopriva]

There are quite a few ways to create motion paths. You can sketch the movement with Motion Sketch, you can copy a mask or shape path into a Position property, you can manually set keyframes…

If you want some specific instructions or advice after reading the After Effects Help section on motion paths.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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[Todd Kopriva]

> It seems I can only cut and paste key frames from one property at a time, not the entire layer

I just tried in After Effects CS3, and I was able to select an entire property group and copy and paste its keyframes to another layer.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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[Todd Kopriva]

Your heading says that you want to connect the expression to keyframes, but then you say that you’d like to control the expression’s influence to be during a specific time interval.

There’s an example in After Effects Help that shows how to make a wiggle only happen during certain time intervals:
“Expression example: Start or stop wiggle at specific time”

There’s also an example that shows how to trigger an expression’s result based on layer markers:
“Expression example: Animate scale at each layer marker”
Because layer markers and keyframes are very similar in the expression language, you can easily adapt this to use keyframes instead of layer markers.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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[Todd Kopriva]

> Because I guess with any effect I apply and want to appear in a specific time, I just move the solids in point to where I want that effect to appear. Am I right??

Yes. That is true with any layer. Move it in time (or trim it) so that the In point is where you want it to start and the Out point is where you want to end.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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[Todd Kopriva]

Your solid layer’s In point should be at the time when you want the lightsabre to appear.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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